Manifest Rationality

Manifest Rationality
Author: Ralph H. Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1135691207

This book works through some of the theoretical issues that have been accumulating in informal logic over the past 20 years. At the same time, it defines a core position in the theory of argument in which those issues can be further explored. The underlying concern that motivates this work is the health of practice of argumentation as an important cultural artifact. A further concern is for logic as a discipline. Argumentative and dialectical in nature, this book presupposes some awareness of the theory of argument in recent history, and some familiarity with the positions that have been advanced. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, linguistics, speech communication, English composition, and psychology.

The Rationality of Perception

The Rationality of Perception
Author: Susanna Siegel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198797087

One of the most important divisions in the human mind is between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we take ourselves to have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Reasoning can be better or worse, but perception is considered beyond reproach. The Rationality of Perception argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what weperceive. When the influences reach all the way to perceptual appearances, we face a philosophical problem: is it reasonable to strengthen what one believes or fears or suspects on the basis of an experience that wasgenerated by those very same beliefs, fears, or suspicions? Drawing on examples involving racism, emotion, and scientific theories, Siegel argues that perception itself can be rational or irrational, and makes vivid the relationship between perception and culture.

Arguments about Arguments

Arguments about Arguments
Author: Maurice A. Finocchiaro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2005-07-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521853279

This book brings together essays by one of the pre-eminent scholars of informal logic.

Rationality

Rationality
Author: Jonathan Bennett
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 144
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780872200661

"In the years since I first read Bennett's brilliant philosophical parable, it has often struck me as incredible that it never became part of the canon of what came to be known . . . as the Language of Thought. Bennett begins, like Mandeville, with honeybees . . . and he takes the reader step by compelling step across the distance that the bees would have to traverse to come abreast of us. The book in my view is a philosophical classic." -- Arthur Danto, Columbia University

The Value of Rationality

The Value of Rationality
Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198802692

Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of the concept of rationality. The Value of Rationality is designed as the first instalment of a trilogy - to be followed by accounts of the requirements of rationality that apply specifically to beliefs and choices. The central claim of the book is that rationality is a normative concept. This claim is defended against some recent objections. Normative concepts are to be explained in terms of values (not in terms of 'ought' or reasons). Rationality is itself a value: rational thinking is in a certain way better than irrational thinking. Specifically, rationality is an internalist concept: what it is rational for you to think now depends solely on what is now present in your mind. Nonetheless, rationality has an external goal - the goal of thinking correctly, or getting things right in one's thinking. The connection between thinking rationally and thinking correctly is probabilistic: if your thinking is irrational, that is in effect bad news about your thinking's degree of correctness. This account of rationality explains how we should set about giving a theory of what it is for beliefs and choices to be rational. Wedgwood thus unifies practical and theoretical rationality, and reveals the connections between formal accounts of rationality (such as those of formal epistemologists and decision theorists) and the more metaethics-inspired recent discussions of the normativity of rationality. He does so partly by drawing on recent work in the semantics of normative and modal terms (including deontic modals like 'ought').

Rationality and the Social Sciences (RLE Social Theory)

Rationality and the Social Sciences (RLE Social Theory)
Author: S.I. Benn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2014-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317651278

The concepts of rationality that are used by social scientists in the formation of hypotheses, models and explanations are explored in this collection of original papers by a number of distinguished philosophers and social scientists. The aim of the book is to display the variety of the concepts used, to show the different roles they play in theories of very different kinds over a wide range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, political science and anthropology, and to assess the explanatory and predictive power that a theory can draw from such concepts.

Rationality and Belief

Rationality and Belief
Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2023-05-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198874510

This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as “correct”, to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. According to this account, rationality comes in degrees: the degree to which one's beliefs counts as rational is determined by their distance from a corresponding probability function - where this distance is measured by those beliefs' “expected degree of incorrectness” according to the probability function; the account also involves an explanation of what determines exactly which probability function plays this role in each case, and of why this probability function should play this role. In developing and defending this account, new light is shed on several central epistemological issues. These issues include: the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification; the debates between internalism and externalism, and between foundationalism and coherentism; the significance - or lack of it - of the notion of 'evidence'; the relationship between credences, full belief, inference, and suspension of judgment; the nature of the kind of possibility that is presupposed by the relevant sort of probability; and whether rationality is “diachronic” - so that the beliefs that it is rational for us to have now depend, in part, on the beliefs that we held in the past. Finally, some suggestions are made about how this theory bears on a range of further topics, including the defeasibility of inference, scepticism, and the analysis of knowledge.

Persons, Moral Worth, and Embryos

Persons, Moral Worth, and Embryos
Author: Stephen Napier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2011-06-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400716028

“Bioethicists have achieved consensus on two ideas pertaining to beginning of life issues: (1) persons are those beings capable of higher-order cognition, or self-consciousness, and (2) it is impermissible to kill only persons. As a consequence, a consensus is reached regarding the permissibility of both destroying human embryos for research purposes and abortion. The present collection aims to interact critically with this consensus. Authors address various aspects of this ‘orthodoxy’. Issues discussed include: theories of personhood and in particular the role of thought experiments used in support of such theories; the notion of an intrinsic potential and the moral relevance of having one; new formulations of the virtue argument against abortion rights; four-dimensionalism and abortion; the notion of moral status and who (or what) has it; scientific accounts of what a human being is, as well as addressing empirical evidence of fetal consciousness; and analysis of the public policy implications given the epistemic status of pro-choice arguments. Given the issues discussed and that the arguments in critical focus are fairly new, the collection provides a novel, comprehensive, and rigorous analysis of contemporary pro-choice arguments.”